Rod Gray
Tidemarker
28 September – 15 October 2011
Climate is the most vital subject of our time. More than at any other stage in human history, it is the epic backdrop for everything going on in human experience and discourse. Powerful tides and storms are tremendous forces with the ability to erase and erode land, life and livelihoods on a scale never thought possible before our present age.The tension between human culture and the enormous resources nature has in reserve is the preoccupation of my work. I am drawn to landscape as a form, however, rarely work from life. The task I engage with in my artwork is to distill the visual matter common to us all and to create from this an essence of experience. Rough hewn and painterly, layered, and colour driven, my work is intended as documention of this process of accumulation. I believe that the feel of the aesthetic thought process should be palpable and present, never glossed or overwritten and lost in the finished piece. Painting has always been about creating relationships with unexplained phenomena. Whether it was made in service of religious thought or the increasingly industrialised dictates of the 20th century, art has consistently grappled with the mystery of the unknown. From cave painting to the contemporary fixations with cell research and cloning, humanity has always used art to understand, translate, and reveal the inexplicable.
The works selected for Tidemarker explore the mysterious suggestiveness of water. The desire and the fear it reveals in us and the beauty and redemption still to be found in the apparent bleakness of contemporary existence.
Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au
Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map
How to get here
Tram: route 11
Stop 21 just north of Edinburgh Gardens
Melway ref: 30B12
Parking in nearby streets
Bus: 504 (Reid Street)
